


it’s my own design; it’s my own remorse

by remnantof



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drama & Romance, M/M, POV Second Person, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 17:59:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2741819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remnantof/pseuds/remnantof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wonder what Cole says to him when you aren’t there to overhear, what he drinks from the cup of this heart.  He would not have shown you this if you hadn’t asked, if you hadn’t snapped at him hard enough to make him snap back.  You let it keep hurting, and he lets the weight hang his shoulders lower and lower, until his spine might snap.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it’s my own design; it’s my own remorse

**Author's Note:**

> Dorian POV fic set throughout the main story. Borrows/paraphrases dialogue from the game, mostly with Cole. Title from “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” a Dorian song if ever there was one. Corinth Lavellan is, naturally, [my Dalish inquisitor](http://remnantof.tumblr.com/post/103755755427/corinth-lavellan). Spoilers for: choices presented by the game, conversations with companions and party banter, Dorian romance scenes.
> 
> edit: [Corinth on the ps4.](http://remnantof.tumblr.com/post/117431829632/corinth-lavellan-2-0)

Time travel makes for strange bedfellows.

You’re not sure anything less would put you in the saddle of what you’re suspecting is either an angrily pregnant mare or Thedas’ shittiest pony—blood and dirt on your robes, hours old rain still damp in your hair, staring at the sharp-eyed banners of the Inquisition. When you’re not staring at the narrow back of the Herald, who is apparently the sort of commoner that hasn’t ridden a horse in twenty-eight years. He’s opted to walk next to the procession, catching hold of a wagon and trundling on its back edge when he tires. You’ve watched him do it twice now, his leather coat pulling with his arm, the tail of it sweeping neatly behind him before he sits.

He knows how to wear the coat, at least.

After another mullish tromp through the deepest puddle in the road, you abandon your possibly-blight-touched mount and aim yourself at the next wagon on. The brackish water on your boots is striped with mud by the time you reach him, and he holds out a hand without prompting. Lean muscle moves under your grip, and you sense no strain in his smooth tug. Archer. Right. The awning of the wagon shakes rain from the trees even as it shelters you both from the spray: an illusion of rain between you and the world.

You feel oddly warm for how the mud soaks against your legs. A cold, perhaps. “I wish we’d managed an idea of the weather whilst traipsing through the future,” you sigh, settling in at his side. You move an arm at his back to grip the wagon-frame as he laughs, doesn’t shift in subtle complaint. He needs no support, hands gripping his breeches at the knees, legs swinging idly over the edge. His quiver rests in your elbow, halting any contact.

“Cloudy with a chance of red lyrium,” he answers, jest rolled with foreboding on his tongue. The quiet he falls into sets your foot knocking his. Felix would kick you nearly every time his father’s gaze turned away—and this is a moment Felix would excel in.

Cassandra rides up as the Herald lifts his head. Their eyes meet, she in the midst of a firm nod. Whatever she sees on his face gives her pause, then spurs her ahead. You forget: she was not truly with you in the future.

If you’re all very lucky, she might never guess her fate. You nudge him again, trying to draw him from its contemplation. “I can complain about something else, if you like.” He laughs again, revealing crooked teeth. It sinks a weight through your center, to make him laugh. His eyes squint from their tattooed edges, not unlike the kohl worn in your homeland. Odd, but not unseen, on an elven face. The marks continue out from the corners, sweeping up his forehead and down his cheeks. Which god he honors, you wouldn’t know.

“I’d love to hear more about Tevinter,” he says evenly, the insult played more artfully than expected. The weight sinks deeper through you when _you_ laugh, sitting hot in your gut for a moment when he shifts his weapon higher on his shoulder, propping himself against your side.

-

When you make camp for the night, he follows Cassandra to her tent, drawn up trying to stretch a kink from his back. You think that is the end of it. Remember: you are a fool.

“Sleep well,” you ask with vicious cheer, when the horns drag him out in everything but his coat. Cassandra is still in the tent, barking for him to pick up his things. She looks to have been up for hours when he lifts the flap, seated on a crate, sharpening her blade. _But what stone whets her edges_ , you think, not unkindly.

He has dark circles under his dark circles, his cut jaw blushes with infection, and you’re reasonably sure he slept in most of his armor. “Yes, mamae,” he sighs, the tent flapping around him like a dismissive hand. When he emerges, he has his bow over one shoulder by its string and his coat half over his head. Knives glitter in his belt, like a terrible smile. The others are crawling from their tents and bedrolls as dawn lights the scene.

They still stare at you, even with conscripted apostates to stare at. A Tevinter noble, swathed in white linens, with a well-groomed mustache. You think you saw yourself on the cover of a bodice-ripper when you passed through the remains of Kirkwall. They stare at you all the more when it coincides with staring at him: his cracked and rumpled leathers are all the more charming in the face of it. His simple, shaven head; his crooked smile. He looks genuinely happy to see you still here, after a day of rain and mud and whispers.

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a morning person,” he says.

Remember: remember.

-

“Just call me Corinth,” he insists, which fits the _I’m not sure what the fuck we’re doing_ feeling you get from Haven as a whole. Everything is _in the process_ of being fortified, there’s one merchant competing with a blacksmith, half a horse-pen up against the walls and soldiers training on the front lawn. There is also a higher ratio of tents to houses, despite a sizeable lower level in the Chantry keep.

Fereldens love to camp, you decide, watching him wander over to Varric’s tent with easy laughter passing between them before he comes to a complete stop. He cuts a decent figure against the snow, wandering around the town to check in on everyone.

“What exactly is your rank,” you ask, the next time he circles over to your corner of town. “Head of the Office of Unexplained Phenomena? Right Hand to the Right Hand?”

“I’m mostly a figurehead, I think. On hand to break stalemates at the war table.” He shrugs a bag higher on his shoulder, elfroot and embrium curling under the clasp. You’re caddy-corner to an apothecary. “If I were any more in charge than that, we’d have to fight a Holy War with Orlais.”

“And we’d lose,” you snort.

He doesn’t hesitate: “Yes, we’d lose.”

“Very inspiring. I feel better already.”

“I’m sure I’ll impress you more in future,” he promises.

-

The search party rounds a thick cluster of pines, lights waving garish and yellow on the snow. It has been three days since Haven was buried. Three days since Corypheus rent the sky with a scream and moved on from his spoiled victory.

Still, a victory.

You aren’t sure why you’re still here, circling the old road to the Conclave with people you barely know, searching for—a body. He sent you away. Something in him busted up so bright and strong, it took your limbs and ran the lot of you back to the Chantry. His final stand was periphery, a child’s toy with a wooden sword, picked up as if in the mouth of a dog, tossed away. The hollow in your side is not very big—you didn’t know him long—but the loss of that bright thing, that puppeteer moving you toward survival—

Of course you’re still here. Of course you walk in circles.

Cassandra is the first to cry out, when a shadow walks out of the night and sways at the edge of your lights. It holds, like it can’t risk the weight of another step. It holds a knife in one hand, rift-energy in the other. You send a glowing wisp out ahead of the torches, catching his attention until the knife drops from his grip. He is looking at you when his eyes roll into his head. He is taking a step when he pitches forward into the snow.

Whatever his position, the Herald is as good as his word.

-

A boy comes to you in the night, head bent under a wide-brimmed hat. His translucent throat sends a chill down your arms, worse than the song you can hear lifting against the night. Chantry song, different from the ones back home. Less praise for man’s ambition, more hope.

Hope won’t help you if the noise draws templars out of the snow like elfroot stalks. That’s—where you remember the boy. He seems more solid, when you shake your head and look at him again.

“He’s awake,” he whispers. “He thought, for a moment, of you.”

One step back from the tent flaps, and he’s gone.

-

“I saw Alexius with the mages the other day,” you mention over a platter of wine. He is doing you a small favor, putting away the cheese and bread so you don’t look like some feeble dependent. You like wine: you don’t like Ferelden cheese. Corinth appears unable to taste it, staring neither out nor at the window, chewing a hard crust. “They’ve given him a staff,” you add, attempting to gather his attention. “He was repairing the southern wall.”

”Hm,” he answers, blinking free of his thoughts. The dark circles are back under his eyes, blurring the edge of his _vallaslin_ , and he seems too-sharp at the jaw. You push the platter closer to his edge of the table; he picks up a pale wedge of something studded all through with nuts and red berries. Stares at it like it’s no less foreign in his own hand, but takes a bite.

Without a second glass, you thrust the bottle across the gap. “I think you should have that.”

“I think I’d fall asleep in this chair.”

“I’m sure I could fetch you a blanket.” His look says he knows you have no idea where linens are kept. “Fetch someone to fetch you a blanket.”

He grimaces: deeper, when he gets his first taste. You’re still waiting for that Orlesian merchant to make good on her pledge to the cause. You feel vindicated, that it goes down no better with the cheese. “Thank you,” he rasps, scraping his tongue on his teeth. “That was certainly distracting.”

You roll your hand on your wrist, copping a short bow in your seat. The wine burns sour down your throat, when he hands the bottle back and you forego your glass. “Do your people make wine? Spirits?”

Pop: he’s rolled his lips in and loosened them against the lingering taste. His tongue clicks on his teeth and he exhales through them. He’s spoken of his clan often enough that you didn’t imagine it a touchy subject, but his guard is up, his gaze chasing something on the horizon. “Root-wine,” he answers, breaking the slice of cheese into bite-sized pieces, but not lifting them to his mouth. “Clear as water, made from root vegetables and fruit. Tastes like—your mouth when you wake up, and the burn of ice. It’ll strip the paint from a wall.”

“You’ll have to let me try it, sometime. You’ve piqued my curiosity.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?” The crumbled cheese piles on the platter, is brushed idly on his boot as he stows his hands in his lap. Humor won’t sustain him: soon, he lifts the hand to his face, rubbing the tender skin below his eyes. Rubbing one eyebrow like a tender spot, a signal to his body to get with the program. You should shoo him off to bed, get enough wine in him that he’ll actually sleep.

You aren’t quite there yet—just enough to close your eyes against his silence, imagine both of you in the oversized bed, a draft from the balcony driving his narrow back up against your chest. In your imagination, he fits perfectly, none of the sharp elbows and hips he must actually possess.

When he speaks, you open your eyes and lift the bottle again.

“Do you think I was too lenient with him,” he asks, dragging you several turns back in the conversation. “I suppose jailing him is still an option, if the decision offends—”

“No,” you answer, hands itching on the bottle. They tend to rash over when you have something important to say, especially if you’re tipsy enough to actually say it. Waiting for an action that doesn’t follow. “He was not the man I knew—in that future, in your court. But I’ve seen him since. Since Felix.

“They were fixing the wall, I said. I saw him watching some of the children at the well—they were playing too close. I’m glad he’s alive.” Another draw from the bottle, your glass forgotten on the table. “I imagine, at the end of this...some young apostate, needing a teacher. Not for the sake of glory, not for the exploration of time and space—just wanting for someone with the blighted _time_ for him. He won’t be a son, and he won’t be me, but. Alexius will have the time, if this ends in our favor. It’s a better future than the one we saw.”

“He has nothing to lose,” Corinth agrees, squinting into the deepening dark of evening. “If I hadn’t given him a purpose, I would have to kill him. And he wants that too much.”

What does this have to do with losing sleep, you don’t ask; what does this have to do with elven wine? When you hold the bottle toward him, he takes it by the neck, bracing against the taste. “Aren’t you the clever sort,” you whisper, mouth struck dry by the truth of it. Weary, and clever, and good. Too good, a light too bright to look at directly. A thing too precious to touch.

“I suppose,” he answers, lips curling with a smile. One dropped tooth catches it on the edge, pulling it to one side. It is your nature, you suppose, to touch him anyway. He puts a hand over yours on his knee, gripping it once as he drinks again. You remember Bull flirting shamelessly as you climbed a damp hill on the coast: _you’re inclined to do the forbidden_. You certainly won’t deny it.

-

You aren’t surprised when Bull and Sera point you up the stairs of the tavern. “Think the Boss is checking on the kid.”

“Make sure it isn’t growing fifty bleeding eyes on its arse,” Sera growls. It tugs the corner of your mouth down, but Bull slips the whetstone whining across his blade, and Sera is back in her cups. You could join them until he came down, drink until you feel as warm and clever on the inside as you project for them.

Goodness: he makes you _nervous_.

Blackwall lifts a greeting to them from the door, cutting through the crowd to Bull’s corner. Sera brightens, counter to the discomfort growing in your gut. You don’t like the man, but you can’t place _why_ well enough to make it _fun_. Perhaps it’s simple—a bearded man well past forty, who isn’t the least impressed with you. Cole would have something to say on that.

Excusing yourself entirely doesn’t occur: you _don’t_ see Cole enough at the keep, and you have said to Corinth that his companions might seek him out for a change. You’ve seen him from the library window, loping across the wet lawn from Cassandra’s training dummies to Cullen’s office. He slipped, once, thin new boots useless on the grass. He’d torn them off and ran barefoot up the steps. A secret smile sat behind his face the rest of that day, and you’d nearly kissed him into the bookcase when he made his way up to you. You’d hovered your hand at his neck, knowing he’d let you hold his pulse. His smile had slipped to the fore, startling you back.

That he _knew_ you wanted to kiss him had paralyzed you. You think you’re over that, now.

Hand to the top of the railing, you pause on the final steps to the attic. You could still make an excuse, say you’re taking the shortcut to Cullen’s office—which isn’t this, considering you left from the library. Corinth’s voice stops you: “What do you sense when you focus on me,” he’s asking, steady and conversational. “The others, they seem to bleed into you from all sides, but you never mention me. If it’s some kind of respect for my station, I’d ask you to have it for the others.”

“It’s not that.” You nearly snort—of course not. “You’re too bright...like counting birds against the sun. The mark makes you more, but past it—you reach across, mindful, meaning. You pull it through to this side, make it real, here.” The strain in Cole’s voice is physical, as if the gears snapped and he has to pull the bucket hand over hand from the well. It quiets him, makes you take one more step and soften your breathing. “And past that, the weight of all on you. All the hopes you carry, fears you fight. You are theirs.”

Corinth exhales, barely a sigh. The line of his shoulders slants closer to even, and he leans on the attic rail. “It must be very hard,” Cole says. “I hope I help.”

You aren’t the only one who noticed—the distant looks, the shadows making him more skeleton than man. Your Herald is tired, the war hardly under way. “It’s alright,” he answers, pushing back to his feet. “You know, I argued with Solas recently. He was angry, he called me _da’len_. ‘Young one.’ An insult in that context, but usually a term of endearment. No one has called me that for some time.”

“It wasn’t an insult,” Cole sighs, a wistful sound. Something about the story is putting him at ease, and you wonder—how he does that. How he manages you all so perfectly. _You are theirs_. “It made him sad. You are tired like he is tired, sometimes, but much younger.”

“I certainly took it as insult at the time,” Corinth laughs. “But I was also happy. I’m happy to be theirs—can you feel it? I was my clan’s, before. I don’t know how to be on my own.”

“Not like Dorian.”

Corinth shakes his head: “I’m sorry Cole, I know you just want to help. But I would prefer you not speak of him where he can’t hear. Of any of them.”

“He can hear!”

Clearing your throat, you put on a smile and ascend the last of the steps. “Hear what? Comparing stories of my rapier wit again? No? Outfits then. The gold I wore yesterday was particularly inspired.” Cole is hiding under his hat, and Corinth has his arms crossed over his narrow chest. Feet planted firm on the floor, postured to chastise. His eyes roll once with a sigh, and he gives up.

“How _are_ you both,” you ask, sweeping them both away from Cole’s well and into your miniature sun.

-

Not every question can bear its answer: the hunted look on his face requires a moment of study to sit the sick realization steady in its place. It is the distant look at its conclusion, making too much sense on an elf, and you never truly noticed. The news he was waiting on has returned from the northeast, with the sail of an Aravel. The yellow stripes shine against the red background, gathered in his hands like precious silks. Good colors, against the golden brown of his skin. Good colors against the sun-white bricks and blue shadows of the hall. He stares through a large hole in the wall, the drafts off the mountain creaking the door of the war room further ajar.

He couldn’t have made it more than twenty steps before something beyond the keep caught his attention. Something to the east. Something missed, something lost.

A theme, among his people. It makes all the more sense, to see his profile pointed by longing to something neither of you can now grasp. Your people are precious to you, distant, a feeling you carry at the bottom of your ribs. Hands holding out diamond goblets to gather a golden liquid—the cups burn their hands, but never, never fill. You wonder if the absence he feels now is very different from how a Dalish clan would feel the rest of the time.

According to Solas, magic wasn’t the only thing Tevinter stole from Elvhenan.

His voice is a low throb through the space. “Leliana has people looking into what happened. She may find the survivors.” He wraps the sail over his arm three times, draws it close. His eyes close and the breeze pulls at your hair when you venture closer. His _vallaslin_ is also a brand, etched with surprising grace over the entire surface of his eyelids. Solas offered to remove it, according to Cole. It’s why they fought.

“The lord we appealed to was responsible for the bandits in the first place. I sent word to him as if we were now equals, instead of ensuring their retreat.” His voice is as rough as you’ve ever heard it, as bitter: “I suppose he would be pleased, to have so thoroughly put me in my place.”

“Would be?”

Tilting his head against the snow-reflected sun, the edge of his jaw is gold bordering on white. It pushes your gaze to the shadow of his face, the eyes gleaming from dark hollows. This look you have also seen on the elves of your homeland, a guarded brand of apathy, a long stare tilted up at the masters. His people could already be in a slaver’s cart, on their way to the Imperium. Their bodies part of the great mechanism, pouring hot gold into heavy goblets. “Leliana is looking into it,” he repeats, and then his body is weary of such darkness, he is sagging and struggling not to let you see him bend to the weight. You look to the heavy doors behind him, wondering if his council still stands around the table, trying to gather themselves while their appointed leader backs away from what didn’t feel like a precipice until the moment you watch his foot track back and imagine him jumping out the hole.

You have had the pleasure of staring down such a drop and backing away, however, and he isn’t. “I’d like to take this to my quarters,” he says, smoothing the front of the folded sail with his marked hand. It occurs to you that he is announcing his intent as an invitation, not a dismissal, and you hesitate the moment longer to let him lead.

“You could hang it from those dreadful owls,” you suggest, reaching for normalcy, for whatever you might say if none of this were happening. “I think I shall,” he answers primly. His face is still a broken stone from the hall and his eyes remain trained ahead, but you know: he will be alright.

Roll your eyes, unsure how any of what you are is any of what he needs. Put a hand firm to the small of his back: “Then let us at least fetch a ladder.”

-

Fate gives no time to grieve, but what was true for Alexius is true for your Herald—there are soldiers to rescue in the south, ruins to explore in the west, literal dragons to literally slay. Your new mount is appreciated—some kind of giant hart with liquid brown eyes, intelligent and sure-footed. A month of exploring deserts and doing favors for Orlais, and Corinth is smiling again. Not all the time, but often enough that Cole returns to spilling _your_ personal thoughts to the air, and Bull has taken to helping him down from his silver mount, swinging him laughing like a child. He sets him carefully on the ground, then cuffs him too hard on the arm, mocking Corinth’s attempts to cuff him back.

Something in him is opening, stretching stalks into the desert air. On the trek home, he races Cassandra and her charger, finally steady in his saddle. At every break, he sets his palm to the velvet of his hart’s nose, performs a ritual of wide-arms and antlers that the rest of you can’t fathom.

“Too elfy by half,” Sera sneers, denying explanation. Solas shakes his head—he understands spirits, not wildlife.

He seems happy enough that you resist his invitation to gather herbs, once returned to the keep. You brought baskets of dried plants back from your furlough, and can’t imagine what you missed. “I don’t see why you’d want to go tromping around the mountain when we’ve just gotten up the blighted thing,” you say, just to see if he tries again.

He tries twice, which piques your interest enough to say yes, having made suitable protest. “The scouts have other concerns,” he argues reasonably, “and the surgeon is too valuable to send out.”

“That makes absolutely no sense as to why _you_ should go,” you point out.

“Josephine’s driving me mad,” he admits. “It’s not my fault I grew up in a wagon.”

“That makes no sense as to why _I_ should go with you.”

No argument follows, but he’s halfway down the stairs and you’re halfway to him, your book left on the chair.

It becomes clear early on that little work will actually be done: he points you at a crop of rashvine growing Maker-knows-how at this elevation, and disappears faster than Cole. The creaking of his footsteps is no greater than the creaking of the trees, the groaning of snow gathered in their boughs. He is opening up, coming alive again. You have _some_ idea of why he invited you, can feel the energy of his game in the pit of your stomach.

You are cold and wind chapped, even with an extra layer draped over your robes and armor. There is snow soaking in at the tops of your boots and a draft going up your thigh, and the ends of your mustache are freezing solid from the moisture of your breath. All for the sight of his edges crisp against the snow, and the clarity of his voice on the wind. For a handful of stories about _growing up in a wagon_.

For a pinch in your side, as soon as you reach up to gather the rashvine at its root. He materializes at your back, digs a finger between your robes and vanishes, laughing like a small clap of thunder. For a moment you don’t breathe, letting your heart slow to its average pace.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather work for Leliana?”

“This isn’t work,” he says, voice echoing against the cliff, obscuring his position. His people were north and east of Kirkwall, across the river. Not the same as mountain country, but it does snow.

When you stow the vines in your pack and trudge to the shelter of the nearest pine, he shakes the snow from a branch, hands gripping it between his planted feet. You close your eyes and let it dust your face with cold. Physically, you are miserable and annoyed, but that energy sits in your gut, warms you when he jumps down to your side and crowds you gently toward the trunk of the tree. This is his element: not the library, not your books or barbed discussions with Vivienne. Your foot slips on an ice-covered root and you grit your teeth for the fall, for looking foolish, but he steadies you with both hands before he laughs. “You haven’t gathered a thing,” you accuse, grasped by elbow and hip.

“And yet, my hands aren’t empty.”

He’s flirting with you—not on a familiar stage, with familiar guile, but perhaps the way his own people do. His mother was a hunter, he’d said. Did she play with his father as he gathered his supplies? Did she fall for his craftsman’s hands?

Corinth hadn’t gone into detail before pelting around the next corner, surprisingly stealthy for someone with a glowing hand. He’d had a hard but satisfying childhood: his parents were still in love, to his knowledge. They were in love for all his life. You imagine it quaint and common, for people outside of your class. Maybe outside all the Imperium, though its men have also backed you into surfaces and put a hand to your hip. The game cannot be that different, always played to the same ends.

But you have left him hanging for too long: he brushes the snow from your cheek and backs away, opening his pack to prove he has done some share of the work. There is ice melting, stars in his lashes when he tips them down to look inside the bag. His brown cheeks are chapped along the bone, and the grey cast of his ears has you back in his space, fussing with the drape of his hood.

Did his father fall for her sharp eyes? Her calloused fingers, scarred wrist? Did they never fight, did they have firm but gentle hands? You want to know where those hands are now—not as much as he does, but still. You have loved, you _have_.

On the way home, he resumes the story. His mother barren for years after the birth of his sister, her prayers to Mythal. A son, ten years later; a blessing to you all. _You are theirs_. You want to kiss him, but you do not know how to disappear beyond the corner, enter the world again at his side and press it to his jaw. You can see a scar on it, a cut that exists outside of time.

You chafed under the responsibility of belonging, but he embraces it. What could he see in you? Your hands are so soft.

-

Very little is safe to do or think in Cole’s presence, but watching Corinth is especially stupid of you. He’s across the lawn on the ramparts, bare feet sure on the sloping guardstone of the steps, firing at targets hung along the walls of the main gate. Josephine is below, wringing her hands, shouting from so far that her voice is nothing but a blur of accent.

You can only imagine his smile, though you can almost see the ripple of muscle in his arms and side when he drops to one knee and fires at the highest target. Dragon slaying, perhaps. You hope it’s some time before you do that again.

“Relinas,” Cole sighs behind you, sliding dreamily against the wall. From anyone else, it would be mockery. From anyone else, you’d think them possessed: “Skin tan like fine whiskey, cheekbones shaded, lips curl when he smiles.” He stands up suddenly, gives a great sober blink behind his hair. “He would have said yes.”

Your heart lifts to your throat, then drops back down. “I’ll thank you not to do that again, please,” you grit. As you are relatively alone this time, you regard Cole sidelong and don’t simply drop it. “Sometimes it isn’t about saying yes, Cole. Sometimes that isn’t the question: do you understand that at all?” Cole squints behind his hair, stares at his feet. “Maybe he’d have to say yes over and over, until he couldn’t anymore. Maybe he’d say yes, but it would go badly for him because of it.”

Cole looks—more chastised than appeased. “Thank you for letting me know I was wanted.”

Across the lawn, Corinth is gold above his green breeches, is losing his limned edges in the setting sun. His arrows glint like a winking eye, like a flash of teeth through the air. He is more than just tan, and hasn’t the slightest bit of hair on his jaw, but you wonder if you don’t have a type. His eyes clear between their tattooed lids, his smile curling around crooked teeth. He looks a bit like Josephine’s elven brother, laughing as she scolds him.

“ _Are_ wanted,” Cole insists.

-

That he comes to you to flirt is of little consequence—plenty of men play the game as a matter of sport, to flex the muscle or amuse themselves, and you are quite good for it. That he also comes to you simply to talk, to be less than the vessel of all hopes and Chantry faith—that is a thing with talons, swooping out of the dark to snatch your breath.

He doesn’t make you talk about your family, but he talks about his own: the things his father built with his own hands, the shem merchants he sold them to. His patience, teaching him to read and write, to count their coin. His mother, a muscle that unwound and stretched by the fire at night, laughing from her gut. At the first blush of dawn she taped her hands with tall grass and tree bark, popped a piece in her mouth to keep the inside wet, and went barefoot into the forest to hunt. She never came back empty-handed, even if she had to stay on the trail for several days. Your own mother is too much like Vivienne for you to imagine it, some small brown woman dragging a beast behind her.

“She was taller than my father, even when they were children. The clan liked to say I’d have trouble finding a wife, with her to set the standard.” He looks out the window, but he’s smiling.

“Do you...want a wife,” you ask, treading too close to your own stories, your own hurts. Plenty of men flirt—plenty of men want a _friend_. Corinth turns his entire head to gaze at you, into you. “I wanted children,” he answers. “I wanted to be them, with someone. _For_ someone. But I am not my father, and there are other things to want.” It renders you quiet, no questions you can safely ask crowding in your throat. He picks up where he left off, telling you of soft breeches and the brittle leather of worn out boots, flaking at every edge. How he liked to run the feathers of new arrows against his cheeks before stowing them in her quiver. Arrows were the first thing his father taught him to make, the first way he served his clan.

If arrows were all your father asked of you, you would fill a thousand quivers. You would toil half the day to pluck the feathers and fell the trees yourself, to shape the metal tips. But this man sits in your chair by the window, dust motes obscuring his sharp features in the afternoon light: but you imagine him in his soft breeches, in his brittle boots, crawling in the mud and dew of early morning, never knowing where he would one day sit.

He smiles, more with the eyes than mouth, but the mouth soon follows. “You would have liked my sister,” he says, smile sharpening. “I don’t know that she’d have taken to you, though.”

Even as you indulge him with a measured “Oh?” you feel the grip of talons around your heart.

-

Talking to your father leaves you wanting to sleep in a very dark place for a very long time: you get the rest of the evening before he rouses you with a hand on your bare shoulder. You come awake all at once, in your armor, in your chair by the window. “I furnish an entire castle,” he says, “and you sleep in an armchair.” His hand is still on your arm, dropped to the edge of your armor, and his callouses are thick and rough against the soft flesh. Send a shiver through you when he moves them, handling you gently as you take stock of the world.

“I was reading,” you rasp. “I do have a room, over the courtyard.”

“Here I thought you were camping in the library, no room for a bed.”

You grip him at the wrist, he pulls you up. Doesn’t step back when you hang your head over his. Even—after today. He doesn’t step back. “The balcony—” you start, then shake your head. You are tired of talking around it, telling Cole _leave me with it, for now_. He can tear it if he wants, as long as someone does _something_. “Will you come with me?”

“Of course.” Of course: he doesn’t move until you step around him, a touch at your elbow saying you look as tired as you feel. It disappears at the entrance to the hall, returns when you’ve opened the door to your surprisingly spartan room. You spend so much time in the library, there is only the bed, the wash station, the wardrobe. Fewer books have found their way here than expected, stacked on the floor with several pairs of boots and simple slippers. He guides you to the bed and toes the heel of a pair, as if to ask—why don’t I have any of these?

“I’ll get you a pair,” you say, voice sounding far from your own ears. He hovers close again, almost trodding on your feet where he stands at your bent knees. You understand why he gave you the letter, why he took you to Redcliffe. Why he told you not to simply walk away—his family is dead. You will be the first say it, if it needs to be said: they are not coming back, and whatever he didn’t hear from their mouths will never be said.

You can understand that.

You are so _tired_ , like a spell meant to stun and paralyze. Like cursed sleep. His voice is a murmur, just above your head. He’s calling you brave, lifting a hand to rub some comfort to the back of your neck.

In your thirty-five years, you _have_ loved. You have had this in pieces—a lover who rubbed the soreness from your muscles at the end of the day, a friend who put you to bed when you fell into this exhausted fog. A roommate at the collegium let the word slip every time you went to your knees for him, and sometimes when he was drunk and mixed up your beds in the dark. All of them beautiful, with sharp tongues and soft thighs, all of them _trying_. Just never as hard as you needed, but love isn’t always getting what you want.

 _Sometimes, love isn’t enough._ “I wouldn’t marry a woman,” you say to your hands, laid open on your lap. “I wouldn’t pretend. Selfish, I suppose. Not wanting to spend my entire life screaming on the inside.”

“Can blood magic _do_ that,” he asks, fitting the pieces together with his fingers in your hair, carding nails over your scalp. A committee of healers had done a study, had decided one specific lump of grey matter could flip the switch. All your father had to do was reach in, cut it out. It still shakes you inside, to think of what might happen. His remorse had been genuine, today, but what good would it have been if he’d spent the next fifty years giving it to a vegetable? “He was going to try,” you answer. “After everything he taught me, even knowing the risks—he was going to try.”

“I’m sorry.” It is not just a thing he says. It is not pity, or what he imagines your father would say—did say, in a roundabout fashion. He wouldn’t perform the ritual now, but he wouldn’t let you live as you see fit, either. What Corinth is sorry for, his hands playing over the rounded shells of your ears and clasping around the back of your neck; what he is getting on his knees to say, is that he’s sorry for the world. That you are all too busy staving off a terrible future to go back and change a terrible past. Not his clan’s, and not your own. It doesn’t matter that the worst didn’t, actually, happen. “I’m glad you left,” he whispers, kneeling between your feet, tugging you at the throat. He is not drunk. He is not _trying_.

It hurts when he kisses you. Physically aches along your sternum, goes too deep, is too much what you _want_. This is dangerous, you know, but you kiss him back. But you ask, “Could I adore you more,” stupid with it, and he’s laughing when you answer, “probably not.”

-

Waiting isn’t like you, but he is a busy man and you are not as brave as he thinks. Then he is angry with you—not terribly, but under the surface of his calm, like a scab over a wound.

You did wound him, denying him to that puss-spewing parasite in Val Royeaux. Of course he doesn’t understand, that what you have is nothing for that man to know. That it is more than he would assume, too good for him, too good for favors from _the Inquisitor_. Orlais might not be the Imperium, but its elves serve its nobles, and several houses will slot him easily in his rightful place when news of this reaches them.

Even now, it boils your blood, sets a pain just over your left brow. You’ve wanted the amulet back since you saw your father in Redcliffe, but not from _that man_. Not because of wasteful use of the Inquisition’s influence.

“I’ve cheapened it,” you argue, when he delivers the amulet personally. “I’ve cheapened you. Now there’s a price set: they’ll all want something of you. I didn’t want to be one of them.”

His hand tightens once on the chain, but his voice is level. “What am I paying for with this, Dorian? What do you think you’ve paid to get it? I will not entertain the notion.”

“You should: it’s fucking politics, and in case you haven’t noticed, that matters quite a bit now!”

“And you don’t,” he asks, voice rising to match your own. “Mythal’s grace preserve me, can I have one thing that I am pig-headed over because it makes me _happy_?”

 _The weight of all on you. You are theirs._ Fist grinding your eye below the ache, you blow a breath against your sleeve. Maker, Mythal—someone preserve _you_. His clan got it wrong, blaming his mother for his lack of bride. He _is_ the person he’s spun stories of, a force of presence that will not be denied. The one who keeps at the hunt for days, weeks, months—and does not come home empty-handed. You _want_ him.

“If we’re going to argue anyway,” you suggest, pulling the teeth from the moment, “I’d just as soon put this energy to better use.”

“My place or yours?” He says it like he’s throwing a gauntlet at your feet.

“Yours, naturally.”

When he thrusts the amulet up against your stomach, you catch it in both hands, a spark lighting up your bones as his hands slide against your arms. “I’ll go clear my schedule.”

-

“Did I see something by Genitivi here,” you ask, anger still shaking itself loose in the pit of your stomach. It’s tangled with embarrassment this time, your gaze returning to the shelf after your outburst. Perhaps he’ll walk away, spare you your foolishness and meet you in your room after dark. The frantic sex isn’t helping, but it’s enjoyable enough, tells your body he’s still here while your head struggles to catch on.

Tells your body it isn’t his fault, while your head still blames him. He’s standing in the corner of your vision, waiting for your head to turn just-so. If you took him by the hand, tugged him toward your room—

“What is this about, Dorian?”

—you could postpone this. His tired stare says: he knows. He’d let you take him by the hand, take him on your bed, with a book digging into his back and his hands clawing your shoulders. In twenty minutes you could break his calm, have him near tears with wanting it, stupid and animal and alive. It would be good, a safer reminder of mortality. And tomorrow, you would still be angry.

“Dorian,” he repeats, sighing.

“When we fell into the chasm, into the Fade, I thought you were done for.”

“I know.”

“Well I don’t know if I can forgive you for that moment!”

“Forgive me? You were right there with me the entire time.”

“For making me think you were dead!”

The corner of his mouth pulls back, just-revealing his teeth, and he stops from shaking his head in exasperation. You have his attention now, even if it’s smoothing out from a sneer. “You sent me ahead,” you press, “and then didn’t follow. For just a moment, I was certain you wouldn’t. I thought, this is it. This is where I finally lose him forever.” His gaze lands on the floor, tilted beyond his folded arms. He looks—guilty. Not the victory you were seeking, or if it was, you regret it immediately. “Are you alright?”

“Stroud is dead.” You nod, start to speak, but he shakes his head and continues. “They both offered to cover us, and I was going to choose Hawke. I thought—what can I use him for after this? Stroud can rebuild the wardens, Hawke, he hid from the Seekers when they needed him. He wasn’t going to stay with us.

“It was a numbers game, Dorian. And Stroud is dead because at the last minute, I didn’t want play. I felt like a monster, so I panicked and did the opposite. That’s your great leader in action. That’s why I wasn’t with you, when you went through.”

“Hawke is a legend,” you argue, “his loss would ripple as far as Stroud’s. Farther.”

The sneer returns to his face, washes away. “A man is dead. I ordered him to stand alone against a demon, and he’s dead.” For the first time, you see him struggling under its weight, looking for a way out of himself. You wish you hadn’t shouted at him, now or ever. You wish you knew how to balm his fraying edge, when you can’t always see it.

_I don’t know how to be on my own._

_Not like Dorian._

“Amatus,” you try, breathing it into his bristle of hair and crowding him in against the window. The tranquil researcher is of little concern, and Vivienne has her own library stacked around her bed. You are as alone as you can be outside of your own room, and he moves toward the sound of your voice like a blossom turning to the sun. You wonder what Cole says to him when you aren’t there to overhear, what he drinks from the cup of this heart. He would not have shown you this if you hadn’t asked, if you hadn’t snapped at him hard enough to make him snap back. You let it keep hurting, and he lets the weight hang his shoulders lower and lower, until his spine might snap.

You threw it back in his face, when he tried to help you. You understand the wound of it now—he thinks you will only shoulder the weight as a debt, and resent it. Thinks he has to run around the keep, meeting the needs of every person to pledge their life under his banner, and now he finds himself wanting.

You understand that, on a smaller scale. Your father certainly finds you wanting.

“There is a reason men face demons for you,” you say carefully, gripping both of his hands. “It didn’t matter who stayed, it doesn’t matter why you picked Stroud. Someone had to decide, or we’d have all stood there like noble idiots until the choice was taken from us.”

One breath through his nose, blown back against your collar: “I’m sure you wouldn’t have stood there that long.”

“I would, to keep from leaving without you.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, _oh_. You daft thing.”

He sags against your grip, so you hold him into the kiss.

-

The celebration is rallying a second wind, voices carrying to his balcony when he finds you in his quarters. You’ve lit the fire and candles, found a decent history of the Empire on his shelf, and moved his chair close enough to the flames to be warm in your evening robes. He’ll make you put on your armor soon enough, you’re sure, but not tonight.

When he mounts the stairs, you stand to put your book and glass on the desk, brandy glowing amber in the light. He draws his gaze from you to the fire, the cup, the bed, with surprising weight. “I’m glad you want to stay,” he says.

“I hear a _but_ on the end of that. A _but_ you walked all the way up here to deliver.”

He frowns, approaching the center of the room and turning to the fire. “You didn’t ask me to go with you.”

“I explained it to you once before, amatus. Do try to keep up.”

He closes his eyes, as if the words wash over him in a shallow wave. Water against the side of a basin: warm, but dirtied by your flesh. Tonight is a celebration, but he is determined to be serious: “You act like I have no will to see Tevinter reformed.” His mouth forms a flat line, he appears to swallow himself. When opened, his eyes are clear, the color of blue sky through green glass. “You act like that’s the only reason. I do more than keep up with you, Dorian.”

The weight drops to your gut, wet and lukewarm. You can be serious too, even with the brandy. “I will not use you. You don’t care, I _know_ you don’t care, not _here_ —but it’s different there. I would be the magister’s son, and every time you deferred to my judgment, every time you sat behind me while I spoke—” You turn away, walking toward his desk. Put your hands on it, sigh, gather the character to turn and speak it to his face: “How impressive I would be, or how small the Inquisition would seem, that I could tame its great Herald. They might not call you my slave outright, but they certainly wouldn’t call you my ally. Corypheus never threatened them the way he did Orlais and Ferelden: most won’t care for your heroism.”

His eyes cloud, narrow to gold slivers in the firelight. “So I should let you go alone, to reform an empire that assassinates every _Archon_ that opposes blood magic? They will _kill_ you.”

“I can take care of myself!”

“You can’t,” he growls, crossing the room to stop one final stride away. You grip the edge of his desk in your hands and refuse to lean back, find yourself wondering why you would—there is no malice in his gaze, tilted steady to your own. “You can’t. No one can.

“ _I’m on my own now_ ,” he parrots, a passable imitation of Cole’s voice. It shivers up your sternum, whispers a gasp through your teeth. He touches your cheek, so calm, so close. “And you were. You truly were.” His second hand is an apology, pressed to the side of your burning throat. “Never again.” Closing your eyes stops the shocked tears, closing your lips sets a tremble down your chin that he nips like a cat before he kisses you. Still holding your face, he leans up on his toes to shift gravity in his favor.

You catch his thighs when he pulls your neck and throws his legs up, forcing you against the desk. The candles spill, half-consume the errant books before you smack them out with a handful of ice. He claws a line through the hot wax with one hand and scatters quill and ink with the other, finding his balance to sway in chest-to-chest.

No one so small should feel so hot, so dense. His fingers are still wax-soft at the tips when he slips your belt open, works them under your robe to your naked side. Why wear armor to a celebration? Why wear anything in his quarters, including bravado? He sucks your upper lip against his teeth, moving hard, but not fast. Deliberate hands slide up to your shoulders, pulling the robes from their proper drape. Deliberate thighs pin you at the sides as he holds you up, into the kiss. This is not conquest. This is not—entirely—desperate.

You’re not sure what it _is_ , heat startled all up under your skin. A kiss: a long, wild kiss. It stretches another moment on, wet and warm, your tongue in his mouth and a hum in his throat.

It doesn’t have the heft and pitch that signals sex. You might cajole him to take you on the desk, but he would laugh under his breath, remind you of the bed _right over there_. How could he let you go across the world on your own: he doesn’t even think you know to differentiate between bits of furniture.

You heave a deep sigh, drained and—quiet. It feels quiet in your head, the conversation imagined at its close, your weight dropped onto the rest of his books. No more blood-red sunsets and cobblestones. No more shouted questions. He is the answer, leaned in with your wrists gathered in both his hands.

Herald, hunter, anchor.

“Never again,” you promise, eyes open when he drops.

-

“You’re happier now, Dorian.”

Cole is paused at the top of a hill, one hand holding his hat against the wind. It washes the tall grass against his legs, and the sun runs your shadow after him on the slope. The grass is gold at the tips, and you’ve noticed warm color in his cheeks, this past week. “Is that what this light, tingly feeling is,” you ask. “I suppose you’re right.”

You stand next to him, watching Corinth and Varric on the shaded slope. Each holds an arrow in a light grip, lifting it in some comparison you wouldn’t understand. Varric offers to put his in Corinth’s thigh if he needs a demonstration, and your Herald laughs, baiting him to track a swooping fowl instead. The grass _smells_ green, when you breathe deep. “Wishing but wondering,” Cole says, tilting his head to the side. “Wounded and wistful. What if he doesn’t want me after?”

Corinth looks back for you both, catches your stare over his shoulder. The sun cuts his cheek like a wooden carving, polished ‘til it retains its own warmth, its own light. The Herald is as good as his word.

You swallow thickly: the cup is overflowing, soothing your burned hands. Your arms are lowering under the weight—you are already separated from the mass, and your cup is full. Your hands are empty.

“But he did.”

“Now you’re smiling,” Cole elates, opening his arms to the breeze. “It’s _good_.”


End file.
